Anyone who has ever used one of MaxBlogPress’ plugins certainly knows to appreciate their value but also has been confronted with the compulsory email opt-in to activate these plugins and has subsequently received regular marketing emails, before unsubscribing.There have been calls within the WordPress.org forums to ban MaxBlogPress plugins from the WordPress.org plugin repository and it looks as if the plugins have now been banned. I could not find any plugin developed by MaxBlogPress in the repository anymore, all links redirect to the plugins main page.

Let’s be clear up front and keep one can of worms closed: The GPL does allow this. Just like donation buttons in themes and plugins are allowed. Even plugins hosted in the official repository. And that’s entirely fine, it’s allowed by the GPL and a nice way to reward developers and designers. So a forced email opt-in to activate should also be possible or?

[pull]What makes a plugin a premium plugin?[/pull]

Over the last two years the WordPress community has seen a massive shift towards paid, premium themes and slowly more and more premium plugins are available as well. There’s no doubt that the ban hammer used on the sponsored themes has helped this new market to emerge and grow.A great, and probably the best known, example of premium plugins is the excellent Gravity forms. But in the case of Gravity Forms you do not pay for the plugin; the plugin itself can be used freely but you pay for the support license. Excellent and very fast support.

Are the MaxBlogPress plugins ‘premium’ plugins?

Keeping in mind that MaxBlogPress a marketing specialist is one could argue that every working email address a form of currency is and the plugins thus ‘premium’ are. We will leave the can other can of worms, whether this is ethical permission marketing or does border on spam, closed.

What do you think, do you use any of the MaxBlogPress plugins? Or did/does the forced opt-in activation put you off and should these plugin types be banned from the directory?

PS: I do think that if you want to install ‘unblockable popups’ on your blog, you might as well give your email address to a marketeer and stop whining. Both are just as unethical IMHO.

How to activate MaxBlogPress plugins without registration

Mac_Boy’s comment got me thinking:

I use the MaxBlogPress plugins by adding a record into the database. That allows me to use the plugin without having to opt-in. If there is a will, there is a way.

I went ahead and installed two MaxBlogPress plugins on my blog: MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer and MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad and who would have thought it, one trip to http://yoururl/options.php later both plugins were activated without giving out any email address and subsequent subscription to a marketing newsletter. Note that this can easily be changed by MaxBlogPress in future versions.

All you have to do is change the value of the [plugin-initials]_activate to 2 and save the new /options.php settings (note the initials I bolded out above the screencap and initials in the screenshot again).

Author: Franky Branckaute

Franky is CEO, Editor and Muppet on Duty at Splashpress Media and sporadically blogs about the professional online life at his personal iFranky blog, when he isn’t annoying his colleagues or blog software evangelists. He also is regular Guest Lecturer on all things New Media and ‘blogging’. Stalk him on Twitter or on Google+

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Comments

I can’t say what constitutes “premium”, but I do agree that those plugins should not be in the WordPress Extend Repository. Having a forced registration and/or activation when all the functionality is in the plugin is not kosher.

Consider Akismet and WP.com stats. These have a sort of forced activation in that you need an API key to use them. However, the actual main functionality of the plugin is a separate service. The plugin is really just an interface to that service, and the key is needed to access the service. This I have no problem with, as many services require keys.

These MaxBlogPress plugins, on the other hand, access no separate services as far as I know. All the functionality is in the plugin itself, and yet there’s a phone home and a forced activation methodology built into them. That code is totally unnecessary for the plugin to actually function, and that’s my main problem with the plugin.

The WordPress Extend repository is NOT an appropriate place for marketers to place their spam and lead-generation mechanisms, even if they attach it to actual useful functionality. It’s one thing to make a separate service and require information to maintain a connection to that service, it’s wholly another to require information for no reason other than to satisfy your own marketing needs.

If you want to force people to register on some separate site, then that site needs to be providing an actual service that they need to register for. Having somebody register just to obtain functionality from code that they already have is bunk that should not be supported. Plugins in the WordPress Extend repository are intended to be FREE, and that doesn’t just mean in cost.

Franky, it would have been blackhat if I had subscribed the user to our newsletter without letting them know about it. How can it be a blackhat when I give them the option to subscribe and then send them a confirmation email to confirm receiving the newsletter?

It would have been white hat if you had offered the subscription as an option. Now you ‘force’ the users to subscribe. The unsubscribe option you refer to is nothing more than the same thing as why spam does continue to work: there still are people who do not know when they are being spammed. Yes, there still are non-savvy bloggers who do not see the unsubscribe link at the bottom of your newsletter.

If you care about your plugins and think they are ethical, I challenge you to remove the subscribe process and for the next weeks to put the unsubscribe link at the top of your newsletter. I said rather black hat. What you do with your plugins is more than grey hat. Leaving ethics aside for a second, it stinks. And you know it does. You know that people would not subscribe to your more than 70% marketing focused newsletter otherwise.

Are you honest or are you a ‘marketing hack’? Remove the activation process, blog about it and I’ll be the first one, with a new entry here, to mention the action you undertook. Until you do so I will be the opinion that your plugins were correctly removed from the repository.

Also I do doubt that your email newsletter would have an unsubscribe option it if weren’t a legal requirement. I do not use Aweber but I would even go as far as saying that the unsubscribe link is generated automatically with every newsletter sent.

Well, then here is a challenge for you. You are forcefully making the visitors of this blog see the google adsense ads, banners etc… in this blog. Can you hide all the ads/banners and put a button somewhere in this blog saying “show me banners”? Of course not. You are afraid not even 0.01% will do that. Because, those ads stinks and nobody want to see it.

In fact, there’s not even opt out process here. There’s no button saying: “Don’t show me the ads”.

You are complaining about the optin form because it’s new to you and people are not used to it. Do you remember, when google adsense came out, how lots of users starts complaining about the websites which installed adsense ads? Now people are used to it and don’t complain anymore.

You can use AdBlock for Firefox, there’s a similar plugin for Safari and something certainly exists for Opera and Internet Explorer. We will not show anyone a message when they use any of these.
You can deactivate Javascript and a majority of the ads will not be visible anymore.

You can even subscribe to the feed and there is only one add below the entries anymore. This site works if you block ads. Your plugins don’t without HAVING TO subscribe. 😉

Everyone can earn from their plugins, I do not wish anything else than that people can make a living of what they love doing and if that’s developing plugins let them become rich. Do not fish for their email though. (Btw, I did not know about the Aweber single subscription option, sorry for that, the countries where I have used newsletter legally required to add an unsubscribe link and have a confirmation process for subscription).

Otto, you saw the optin form only but you didn’t see what else we provide. Gravity forms requires you to pay for the support. However, we do that for free.

The reason the optin form is there is to support the development of the plugin. Isn’t it good, we developed a business model so that we can provide free support, free bug fixes and free feature updates without requiring the user to pay in terms of money? We have released more than 25 free plugins and we have been working full time on this project since 3 years. Isn’t it surprising that we have released only 1 paid plugin in all those years?

The subscription is for a newsletter which user has full control to unsubscribe. We include unsubscribe link at the bottom of each and every email we send. The unsubscribe is automatic and instant. No obligation. User can continue to use the plugin even after unsubscribing from the newsletter.

You could even make it really easy and just have a button that says “Subscribe me for Newsletter Updates” You won’t get everyone, but at least you might get more subscribers than animosity over your current method.

totally agree with you too otto, i think the wordpress repository should be for free themes and free plugins, thats it, everyone is free to sell themes and plugins, but when you go to wordpress.org you expect the plugins/themes to be as free as the software itself… its just confusing and sometimes misleading to have both free and paid on the same place…

on another note, no problem with themes having linkbacks (although i think the ability to remove or not should be left to the users conscience and not in breaking some copyright) and plugins having donate buttons and even asking for e-mails, if that doesn’t break the functionality, making asking for mails mandatory or having call homes or doing anything besides what its supposed to do puts it into spam/spyware/mallware, its not even premium, at least when you pay its not gonna spam your mailbox or do other stuff that isnt supposed to do, thats just nasty, besides you and me know better, but a lot of people don’t and they are the ones that are tricked into giving their e-mail away and then are tricked into buying viagra or whatnot…

How can themes can have backlinks to support the development but a plugin can’t have an optin form to support the development, support and bug fixes?

I understand if the theme developer put the backlink in code or setting page but how can they claim the real state in the website itself? That’s something to think about.

We have strict policy regarding handling the email. First of all, we don’t sell the email to third party. Second, the emails are strictly used for sending our newsletters which includes tips as well as the recommendation for related products/softwares. Third users are not holded hostage in our newsletter. We include unsubscribe link in each and every email we send. If the user don’t like our newsletter they can unsubscribe anytime they like and we never send a piece of email to them ever again.

Because an options page backlink is not the same thing as an optin-form – especially when that opt-in form is required before the user can ever use the plugin.

As for theme footer credit links: they are easily edited/removed, and are not required – unlike your Stripe Ad plugin, in which you claim it is a violation of the license to remove your link.

And you may honor the unsubscribe request, but if that same user ever installs another MaxBlogPress plugin, they are once again required to subscribe to the newsletter – a newsletter from which they have already unsubscribed.

When I first installed one of their plugins I was very turned off by being forced to register my email address. I went ahead anyway and just unsubscribed from the newsletter, but it does prevent me from recommending the plugin to any one.

Well, here is the proof. Tyson, after unsubscribe did we send any email again? Of course, NO. You didn’t like what we offer and you chose to unsubscribe. That’s fine and I’m happy to give that control to the users.

We are not forcefully holding any of the user. They are feel to unsubscribe the newsletter if they don’t like it and they are free to uninstall the plugin if they don’t like it. There’s not any kind of forceful action there.

Those are nice words but they are totally irrelevant and beyond your control. Fact is that you don’t operate the email list, Aweber does. You only provide content, Aweber requires the user to confirm the subscription because otherwise it would be too easy for marketers to send out unwanted email.

What you do though is push your email newsletter on users. Without at least subscribing (and hopefully not unsubscribing) you do not let anyone benefit from your plugins, some useful ones even.

You would break the Aweber ToS otherwise, unsolicited email is illegal in many countries and would be ‘marked as spam’ etc etc etc.
All things you are very well aware of but try to wrap into ‘nice words proving how nice MaxBlogPress is’. If you were you would delete the activation process and maybe consider another financial strategy.
It’s wrong, it’s unethical and it sucks if those are the strategies you have to rely on as marketing specialist. I would not hire you and due to the malicious nature of the newsletter I do not recommend anyone your plugins.

Well Franky, not anyone hold a gun in my head and asked me to signup for the Aweber service. I know what they allow and what they don’t and it’s me who took the decision to deliver the newsletter via their service. If I want to run my business in some other way then of course you know there are plenty of ways to do that. That’s how spammers operate.

For your kind note: aweber allows us to use single optin as well. It’s my decision to use double optin.

Another financial strategy is to ask for money to use the plugin. Not everyone can pay the money for the plugin. I made a way out to offer free (in terms of money) service with the help of newsletter. If you don’t like our plugin then of course I’m not forcing you to use the plugin. It’s the users decision and I’m happy whatever they decide.

I can’t really say if that makes it a ‘premium’ plugin, but I’m glad it was removed.
I am very happy with the state of the plugin/theme directories at WordPress.org

I know I can visit wordpress.org and everything I get from there comes no strings attached (other than the GPL). I can use the plugins and themes on customer’s sites, I can use them on commercial sites, and I can hack them to my heart’s content, legally.

If someone devotes their time and energy into creating a plugin and/or theme and offers it up via GPL-licensing to the community, is it really so bad for them to put a link in their admin section asking for donation, even if it does request them to link to the blog or click a button that says “I already donated?” It’s GPL so anyone who wants can fork it and get rid of it if they like. Some developers may not want their clients to see a donation button, but shouldn’t that developer who is getting paid give a little back to the plugin/theme developer who helped them get paid? It seems like being against this is like “biting the hand that feeds…” (with some thumping NiN cords in the background… 🙂

Also, while I also don’t see why it’s so bad to have an external link on a theme (i.e. not in the admin console), I can see where some might feel that is over the top but still they are providing a valuable service; why shouldn’t they be able to get a link? Again, the user can modify the GPL theme if they like and remove the link.

I do see where they shouldn’t imply that it must be paid to license it because that would violate the GPL, but if it’s made clear it is only a request for donation, what’s wrong with that?

“Also, while I also don’t see why it’s so bad to have an external link on a theme (i.e. not in the admin console), I can see where some might feel that is over the top but still they are providing a valuable service; why shouldn’t they be able to get a link? Again, the user can modify the GPL theme if they like and remove the link.”

GNU defines GPL as a ‘free software” license. Quoting from the GNU definition of Free Software:

“The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user’s purpose that matters, not the developer’s purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.”

While your purposes, as the developer, may be for users of your plugin to provide a public-facing backlink, your purposes don’t matter. All that matters are the user’s purposes. Forcing such a backlink violates the GPL in that it represents a use restriction, and also in that it compels the user to communicate with arbitrary third parties (i.e. his site visitors) regarding his use of your plugin.

the only greedy webmaster would be stealing someones code or using nulled scripts or whatnot, besides that, whats the problem with expecting some stuff to be free, wordpress is free, if the wordpress team decided to turn post titles off, and you now need to pay for a plugin for titles you would be pissed, because you expect titles to be important for your site to work as it should, well some of the plugins are practically essential for wordpress to work as you wanted, wordpress is as solid because of the free plugins, same thing for firefox..

not that there shouldn’t be premium plugins/themes, just that the free plugins are a big part of how awesome wordpress is, the problem here is greedy/sleazy plugin developers, and giving your e-mail is paying, cause those mails are gonna fill your e-mail box, they are gonna spend your time, they are gonna make your server have to manage more mails, and for some people thats more pricey than paying currency…

It’s different to collect emails without permission and send SPAM and it’s different to let the user know that they are subscribing to a newsletter. We use double optin process for the newsletter. And even after subscription user are free to unsubscribe. See Tyson’s comment above.

If subscribing giving a try to a free newsletter entitles free support, free bug fixes and free updates then what’s wrong with that?

If you check then you’ll find we have support link in each and every plugins. How many free plugins have you seen dedicated to that kind of support?

While open source is a great thing, it has lead to a lot of ‘greedy’ webmasters who expect everything they need at little to no cost.

Nobody forces anybody to develop for an open source platform. This approach to release a plugin may make sense and be totally accepted in some (rather grey hat) niches, but expecting that someone else pays for the hosting and bandwidth… oh yeah, open source!

I stick to my guns: working email addresses are a currency and thus a form of payment.

For those who use MaxBlogPress plugins, I have released a plugin that automatically “activates” all installed MaxBlogPress plugins (basically, doing what you describe in your update.

I also forked the MBP Favicon, Ping Optimizer, and Multi Author Comment Notification plugins. All are available in the wp.org repo.

As to your original question:

I don’t think the question of whether the forced opt-in causes the plugins to be premium is the appropriate question. The question is, do the plugins conform to the guidelines for inclusion in the wp.org repository? IMHO, for the following reasons, the answer to that question is “no”:

1) The plugins, which self-contain all necessary functionality, require “registration” and subscription to an email list in order to “activate”.

In my opinion, this behavior violates the GPL requirement that the user not be restricted in the use of the software (this freedom of use being defined to include not requiring the user to communicate in any way with the developer about the use of the software).

Forced opt-in to an email list is plainly a use restriction (and one for which the plugins check every time the options page is loaded). Both the opt-in and registration are forms of forced communication with the developer.

2) The plugins circumvent the wp.org SVN and check for (and install) updates directly from the MBP web site, which by my reading of the wp.org repo guidelines, is itself a violation that hosted plugins actually use SVN for hosting, rather than merely using the repository for listing.

3) Many users complained that the email list to which they were forced to subscribe behaves in a “spammy” manner, sending out far too many (daily or near-daily) emails of marginal usefulness (and that may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the plugin they installed).

In conclusion, these plugins certainly have a right to exist – but they do *not* have a right to be hosted in the wp.org repository.

Chip, I have updated the entry with a link to your plugin profile on .org.

I purposely wrote the one line to avoid license discussion. As later discussed in WordPress Weekly chat, even this is no black/white case and I really did not want to focus on the license.
(Edit: an the easy option to deactivate this via options.php makes it even harder to clearly state whether they are compliant or not. Anyway, enough of that discussion.)

As for the use of ‘premium’, I opted for that term as it seems to have replaced ‘paid’ lately.

Did they use an own update repo? I only had a quick look at the code of one but didn’t find a check with another than WP repo, but I only looked very briefly as you were really fast with your forks. 🙂

Thanks for the link! (Though, I’m thinking the auto-activate plugin will prove to be more useful than the forks.)

As for the GPL issue, I’m going to cover my opinion on the GPL issue on my own blog post.

As for the “paid”/”premium” question: whichever term is used, being designated as such does not preclude a plugin from being hosted at wp.org. (Having a hosted “basic” plugin with a for-pay “pro” version available is kosher, provided that the functionality in the “basic” plugin is itself useful.) That’s why I said that it really comes down to whether or not the plugins conformed to the stated guidelines for inclusion in the repo. And, IMHO, they clearly don’t.

As for the update repo: yep. Whenever the options page is loaded, the plugin looks for an update on the MBP web site. Refer to function xyzExtractUpdateData() (where ‘xyz’ is the specific plugin prefix), and within that function, refer to the variable $version_chk_file, which points to a maxblogpress.com URL.

(Reposted with the blockquotes fixed. Please delete the another same comment)

Chip, regarding the GPL compliancy, we have already discussed about this to death. Let’s not bring it here for endless discussion.

2 The plugins circumvent the wp.org SVN and check for (and install) updates directly from the MBP web site, which by my reading of the wp.org repo guidelines, is itself a violation that hosted plugins actually use SVN for hosting, rather than merely using the repository for listing.

In the past there was no automatic notification and automatic installtion for the plugins. We custom developed such features for the support of our user. Talk about dedication. At that time no other plugin developer had thought in that way. I think we were the only one who provided such easy features to users.

Later, wordpress built its own wordpress directory and then provided update notification and automatic install to the wordpress users. Those codes are there as it is from the past to be developed further for other features. Our plugins now gets updated by wordpress repository in the same way as other plugin does.

I haven’t listed some of our plugins in the wordpress repo and they are still being updated using our custom install routine. That’s for user convenince and you should actually praise us for doing such a hard work for creating better user experience for the user.

3) Many users complained that the email list to which they were forced to subscribe behaves in a “spammy” manner, sending out far too many (daily or near-daily) emails of marginal usefulness (and that may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the plugin they installed).

There are thousands of subscribers who love the newsletter. If they don’t like it then they are free to unsubscribe and we will never send them any email ever again.

In the past there was no automatic notification and automatic installtion for the plugins. We custom developed such features for the support of our user. Talk about dedication. At that time no other plugin developer had thought in that way. I think we were the only one who provided such easy features to users.

Later, wordpress built its own wordpress directory and then provided update notification and automatic install to the wordpress users. Those codes are there as it is from the past to be developed further for other features. Our plugins now gets updated by wordpress repository in the same way as other plugin does.

You’ve brought this up about three times now.

As soon as the WordPress.org SVN became available, your update code became obsolete for WordPress repository-hosted plugins.

That was two years ago, and the update code is still in the plugins. The plugins still check your site for updates – even the ones that were hosted in the WordPress repository.